Too much of a good thing – What everyone gets wrong about brand portfolio architecture

Today, I’m going to yammer on about a part of brand strategy that I love to nerd out on, and find not enough brand leaders really have a handle on: brand portfolio architecture. But, we’re going to start in a store. Specifically, the Whole Food Market on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. My Whole Foods.  Too much choice is a bad thing. Need proof? Exhibit A:  me, two days ago, in the milk aisle.

Whole Foods Market, Pearl Street, Boulder, CO

Choice isn’t all good

It used to be that the only real choice you had in buying milk was whole or skim. It was a simple enough task that as a child, my mom would let me pick the one with the blue top out of the case all by myself. Usually I got it right.

Yesterday, however, I was confronted with the very fact that milk comes in too many options. Working from the bottom to the top we had the store brand, then the organic version of the store brand, then the natural national brand, then its organic version, then a host of increasingly specialized options in increasingly smaller sizes for increasingly large amounts of money per ounce. I counted 12 options for picking whole milk. There’s also 2%, 1%, and skim. And because the version I usually buy was out of stock, what should have taken me seconds had me stumped. In addition to size, I had to decide between organic versus no hormones versus whatever is neither; carton, plastic jug or glass jar; milk from happy cows, educated cows, or perhaps no cows at all; not to mention the brand. My mouth agape, I stood staring for a couple of minutes before picking my milk and moving on. 

Forgetting about the consumer is issue #1 in brand portfolio architecture

And this is where brand portfolio architecture comes into play. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to (re)design a number of brand portfolios. I’ve crafted various organizing principles, I’ve debated rules for portfolio management, I’ve turned things sideways in order to make way for innovation, I’ve even modeled out the impact on sales of different portfolio structures. Big companies needing to cut the number of brands they have, small companies needing to expand and evolve into new areas.  If there’s a brand portfolio architecture block, I’ve been around it a few times. I love it because getting it right is one of the best ways to align brand with business. Way more than purpose (doesn’t actually drive choice), way more than a new campaign (old campaigns that are good work better than equally good new campaigns) and way more a redesigned logo (Tropicana, anyone?). Figuring out how to align your brands with the needs and preferences and diversity of your consumers means making it easier for those consumers to choose you. And if it’s easy, they’ll choose you more. 

But buying milk highlighted just how chaotic things get when we make things too complicated and too burdensome for consumers. It’s an example of what happens when you build a portfolio (in this case, we’ll use the Whole Foods’ milk fridge as the portfolio) that doesn’t strike a balance between the needs of consumers and the needs of the business. And rather than delight me by making sure there was a milk for me, it left me frustrated. (Turns out, I’m not alone. Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper’s 2000 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? – confirms that too much choice can “hamper motivation to buy”.) 

And lately, whenever I see firms – consultancies and agencies I’ve worked at, helped, advised and competed against – talk about portfolio architecture they seem to be approaching it from the perspective of the client company, not the client’s consumers. I’ve seen new architectures rolled out that maintain complexity, keep everyone happy internally, but don’t do a lick to make life easier for consumers. Apply that to the milk aisle, and what we have is a portfolio that does a lot to organize things, but not enough to help me choose. Which is a problem. 

The purpose of brand portfolio architecture is not to explain what a company does. It’s to make it easier to choose.

The purpose of brand portfolio architecture is not to explain what a company does. It is not to present a Cheesecake Factory menu-like array of options. It is not to reflect the world as we wish it to be. The purpose of brand portfolio architecture is this: to make it easier for consumers to navigate and choose. Sometimes this means cutting the number of brands you have. Sometimes it means looking at things from a different point of view. Sometimes it means trading one set of organizing principles for another. But, whatever it takes, the goal has to be to make it easier to choose, and usually that means making things a bit more simple. It takes shifting your worldview, moving through the world of your consumer, and finding an intersection between how people choose and how you’d like them to.

So, with that, I offer up some starting points for building a better brand portfolio architecture. 

A better portfolio is one one that balances the needs of a company with the needs of its consumers

When it comes time to start laying out your options, this framework can help get you thinking from a lot of different perspectives.

Brand Portfolio Architecture is not rocket science

And, as for the milk, I eventually bent down and picked a jug of the cheap stuff from the bottom shelf. After all, it was just milk.